Greed? On the sharemarket? Never!

Obvious Otis headline of the morning goes to the NZ Herald for this AFP story …

Oh noes! Greed blamed? (NZ Herald - click)

The sell-off sparked more finger pointing and anger from those who had expected the price to zoom to massive gains like the immediate doubling of career-oriented social network LinkedIn’s IPO price last year.
“Investors are searching for someone to blame and there are plenty of suspects,” said Paul Ausick at 24/7Wall St.
Analysts blamed especially lead underwriter Morgan Stanley for allowing Facebook last week to increase the price and the offering size to 421 million shares, raising $16 billion.
“The underwriters placed the stocks with people who really were not that committed to owning it, and so a lot of them sold it,” said Pachter.
“They sent us false signals by adding 84 million shares to the offering on Wednesday, so right before they went public,” he said. “They were wrong, they completely blew it.”

I will never forget attending an investment training workshop where I heard the saying professional investors use to describe the ‘mum and dad’ investors whom they refer to as ‘pigs’:

The pigs go to the market to get slaughtered.

That, and Michael Lewis‘s book Liars’ Poker, plus some salutary lessons of my own learned about the manipulation of shares by company directors taught me all I needed to know about gambling on the sharemarket.

Pigs are high-risk investors looking for the one big score in a short period of time. Pigs buy on hot tips and invest in companies without doing their due diligence. They get impatient, greedy, and emotional about their investments, and they are drawn to high-risk securities without putting in the proper time or money to learn about these investment vehicles. Professional traders love the pigs, as it’s often from their losses that the bulls and bears reap their profits.

Make sure you don’t get into the market before you are ready. Be conservative and never invest in anything you do not understand. Before you jump in without the right knowledge, think about this old stock market saying: